One of the most significant additions to this version of Office is that it recognizes voice commands and can take dictation. Rather than clicking through a stack of menus and dialog boxes to get what you want, you simply tell your Office applications what to do, and they carry out your every command. In this chapter, you'll learn how to set up your computer to take advantage of the speech recognition features, and how to train Office to recognize your voice and carry out your commands.

This sample chapter is excerpted from Complete Idiot’s Guide to MS Office XP.

In This Chapter

Look, Ma, no hands—typing via dictation

Making sure your computer can "hear" you

Installing the Office speech recognition feature

Training Office to understand your spoken words and commands

Hand writing a document in Word

It's no coincidence that Office XP has built-in speech recognition and
was released in the year 2001. Ever since Bill Gates saw the futuristic film
2001: A Space Odyssey, he must have had a vision of creating a computer
that could understand voice commands and take dictation. Sure, he didn't
call this new version of Office "Hal" (after the talking computer in
the movie), but if he weren't fighting so many legal battles already,
I'm sure he would have toyed with the idea.

Be that as it may, one of the most significant additions to this version of
Office is that it recognizes voice commands and can take dictation. Instead of
clicking through a stack of menus and dialog boxes to get what you want, you
simply tell your Office applications what to do, and they carry out your
every command. Do you want this page printed? Say, "File, print, current
page, Okay," and your printer spits out the page. Do you need to type a
document while you're getting your weekly manicure? Switch to dictation
mode and start talking.

In this chapter, you learn how to set up your computer to take advantage of
the speech recognition features. You also learn how to train Office to recognize
your voice and carry out your commands.

First, You Need a Microphone: Hardware Requirements

Although you don't need a professional recording studio to start using
the speech recognition feature, you do need a fairly powerful computer equipped
with a sound card and a high-quality microphone. To ensure your system is
properly equipped, read through the following checklist:

Processor—Pentium II 400MHz or faster. Don't try speech
recognition on anything slower than a Pentium 400MHz machine. I tried running
speech recognition on a computer with an AMD K6 300MHz processor with 96MB of
RAM, and I could type about 10 times faster than speech recognition could take
dictation.

Memory—128MB RAM. Don't even try to run speech
recognition if your system has less than 128MB RAM.

Setting up your hardware and training speech recognition to recognize your
voice can take more than an hour. If you're in a rush, skip this chapter
and come back when you have some time.

Close-talk microphone—Your Karaoke microphone might work fine
for belting out a few bars of "I Did It My Way," but it's
probably not the best choice for speech recognition. You need a close-talk
microphone that's designed to block out background noise. Otherwise, Office
won't be able to understand a word you say. If your system has a built-in
microphone or a microphone that sits on your desk, you must buy a new microphone
that can handle dictation.

Positioning the Microphone

Get a microphone with a headset mount and position the microphone about one
inch from the corner of your mouth. Don't position the microphone directly
in front of your mouth, or it will record all your heavy breathing. Try to mount
the microphone in the same position each time you use it.